A Bay Area jazz and blues legend who once mentored a young Kehlani will headline a multigenerational lineup of Bay Area artists at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall on August 30. Miss Faye Carol, whose vocal mentorship helped shape the Grammy-winning R&B star long before she topped charts, will perform excerpts from her commissioned work “Blues, Baroque & Bars” backed by a live band and string quartet at the fifth annual Black Music Festival.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the festival, organized by Carol's nonprofit School of the Getdown, kicks off at 4 PM and costs $45 to $50. The venue itself, located at 859 O'Farrell St. in San Francisco, is far from foreign territory for Carol. She performed there frequently in the 1980s and recorded her 1985 live album, “Alive at the Great American Music Hall,” on that very stage, according to fayecarol.com — meaning her return four decades later carries the weight of a full-circle moment.
Carol's path to that stage began long before her name became synonymous with mentorship. She launched her secular music career in the 1960s, performing with the Oakland blues and funk group Johnny Talbot & De Thangs, according to the Oakland Symphony, after starting out singing gospel in church before moving into funk, blues, jazz, and cabaret.
A Six-Decade Legacy of Teaching and Performing
Carol founded the School of the Getdown in 1998 as a vocal workshop series before it expanded into youth music education in Berkeley by 2000, according to the Alliance for California Traditional Arts. The organization was built to preserve traditional African American musical forms and pass them down through workshops and community festivals, and it is now the entity organizing this fifth annual Black Music Festival.
Beyond Kehlani, Carol's vocal mentorship and band leadership have helped train notable artists, including Grammy-nominated singer Ledisi, pianist Benny Green, and bassist Marcus Shelby, per InterMusic SF. Her cultural footprint in the region has been formally recognized, too: Berkeley proclaimed a Faye Carol Day in 2018 and Oakland followed in 2024, while she was inducted into the Oakland Walk of Fame in 2015, according to fayecarol.com. Carol moved to the Bay Area from Mississippi in the late 1950s and has spent more than six decades performing and teaching locally.
Blending Blues, Baroque Strings and Hip-Hop
The festival's centerpiece, “Blues, Baroque & Bars,” was commissioned through a Hewlett 50 Arts Commission in partnership with Art + Soul Oakland and first premiered in July 2022, according to Funcheap. The suite combines classical string arrangements with blues and hip-hop to chronicle Black American history, and at the festival, it will feature an intergenerational lineup including Bay Area rappers Rico Pabón, Tia Nomore, Ian Kelly, and Professor Kee performing alongside a live band and classical string quartet, per the Bay Area Registry.
Sharing the bill is Paula West, an award-winning jazz and cabaret vocalist who, per the Chronicle's reporting, will perform selections from the Great American Songbook alongside reinterpretations of songs by Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Lou Reed and Johnny Cash. West's national acclaim is well established: she earned three consecutive New York Magazine Nightlife Awards for Outstanding Female Jazz Vocalist during recurring engagements at the Oak Room in New York's Algonquin Hotel, according to Jazz in the Bay. She is a San Francisco-based contralto known for blending the Great American Songbook with folk and rock interpretations.
Tuck & Patti Round Out the Bill
Also performing is the acoustic duo Tuck & Patti, featuring guitarist Tuck Andress and singer Patti Cathcart, who the Chronicle reports plan to showcase their signature mix of virtuosity and heartfelt repertoire with original works, gospel songs and pieces by Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles and Duke Ellington. The duo met in a Bay Area band in 1978 and broke through commercially with their 1988 Windham Hill Jazz debut album, “Tears of Joy,” which sold more than 100,000 copies, according to the Los Angeles Times. Andress is also the uncle of Grammy-winning rock and pop star St. Vincent, per the Chronicle's reporting.
The Great American Music Hall itself adds another layer of history to the night. Built in 1907 as “Blanco's” during the city's post-earthquake reconstruction, the Tenderloin district venue was designed by a French architect and is known for its ornate interior columns and balconies, according to Eventim. Its general admission capacity ranges between 470 and 700 guests, giving the fifth annual Black Music Festival an intimate setting for a lineup spanning generations of Bay Area sound, from Carol's decades-old blues roots to the hip-hop verses of Rico Pabón and Tia Nomore.
